Building a successful sales career is challenging, but it can also be interesting and satisfying. To help determine if you have what it takes to build a career in sales, here are seven best practices that are the foundation of most every successful salesperson.

In this era of Big Data, we’re inundated with messages to use data to drive personalized and predictive experiences for customers. But for many, the gap between this data-driven vision and reality is large and growing. Machine learning alleviates the burden of establishing fixed rules for how to react to data. Here are four recommendations to help you get your sales, marketing and support data ready for machine learning.

Nevermind competitors, salespeople's most formidable adversary is the human preference for staying the course even when the current situation is clearly to their detriment. We look at why buyer indecision happens and what sellers can do to make sure it doesn't.

By 2020, it is estimated that millennials will make up more than half of the work force. Many of them are being promoted to decision-making positions. Dustin Grosse, Chief Operating Officer of ClearSlide, a sales engagement platform that empowers sales teams to engage customers, recently shared his thoughts about the changing dynamics of buying, selling and managing the generation that is out to save the world.

We may take digital advertising channels for granted at this point, having seen them around so much, but that’s a dangerous attitude to take. The second the original motivation for an ad campaign is forgotten, so are the goals that it seeks to achieve. When you exploring our digital roots, it becomes apparent why digitial marketers and social media managers are so important.

Meeting planners are seeing their role influenced more and more by technology, not just for the meeting itself, but in researching and booking venues, how planners interact onsite, and how they communicate following the meeting. Following extensive research among its membership, the International Association of Conference Centres (IACC), a global association that serves the meetings industry, released its top meeting tech trends for 2015.

The negotiation process is a lot like a chess game where strategy reigns supreme – one thoughtfully considered move at a time. Here are seven critical strategies for emerging victorious in any negotiation.

In working with hundreds of sales forces, we have found that ineffective sales management is usually due to one or more of three common failings. By addressing these issues, companies can elevate the effectiveness of their managers, which in turn will boost the performance of the sales organization as a whole.

As social selling takes on greater importance in the sales process, organizations – including marketers, trainers and sales enablement professionals – can use the summer months to help sales teams get savvy about social selling, and lay the groundwork for strong sales.

Current Issue:

From the Editor...

When you’re pregnant (or when your partner is pregnant), you start seeing pregnant women everywhere you go. Something similar happens every time we put together our annual summer issue, with its focus on technology’s impact on sales and marketing.

Closers (...by Canon)

Embracing the customer-built brand

The former director of corporate and financial communications for Harley-Davidson talks turnarounds, interacting with customers and – duh – bikes. more...

Additional Web Resources

Secrets to Video Marketing Success
Video has immense potential in B2B marketing, but many companies have been slow to adopt it. Chuck Kapelke provides quick tips for better use of video in an article published in B-to-B Marketer, a publication of the Business Marketing Association. Read the full article.

The Looming Talent Crisis
“Workforce 2020: The Looming Talent Crisis” is a report from Oxford Economics and SuccessFactors that examines the most effective employee motivators, examines why 60% of employees are unhappy with their jobs, and reveals the biggest untapped source of leadership talent that is hiding in plain sight. Download it here (registration required).

15 Things to Train Salespeople On Instead of Social Selling
Sales leader and consultant Anthony Iannarino explains why he’d train on more than a dozen other sales skills before jumping on the social selling bandwagon. Read his blog post here.

Trade Show Smackdown
In our March/April issue, we asked marketing and sales managers how they felt about the return on their trade show investment. Their responses can be found here.